Kitsch in the Kitchen

British-born Graham Kerr, commercial TV's answer to Julia Child, made his U.S. debut in seven cities only last month. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, his syndicated half-hour weekday show, The Galloping Gourmet, is already so hot that it will soon go into prime time once a week. Two other markets will join next week. Before the year is out, Kerr, 35, may well become as ubiquitous on TV sets as the White Tornado.

Kerr's school is less Cordon Bleu than Folies-Bergere. On Julia Child's low-budget public TV series, the wine was faked with a mixture of water and Gravy Master. Graham guzzles the real stuff from a goblet throughout the program (in seeming violation of Article 3, Section 17 of the Broadcasters' Code). His other constant prop is an arch smirk. He prances onto the kitchen set the way Sugar Ray Robinson used to approach the ring, then pirouettes so that the tittering ladies in the studio audience can admire his costume du jour. He has 27 of them--black tie for a filet steak Washington, for example, and a kangaroo-skin bush jacket for less formal dishes. He opens with a bit of humor or reminiscence, perhaps h;s somewhat askew impression of Terry-Thomas, perhaps some war stories about his days as chief catering assistant in the New Zealand air force. After that comes some pure kitsch. "Oh, I've got it all running down my chinny-chin-chin," he cries cutely as he savors a leg of lamb. "Oh, you're going to be so impressed with me," he coos as he peers at another of his chefs-d'oeuvre.

Slurps and Glugs. Kerr keeps the kitchen asmoke with naughty innuendoes. The Chinese, he notes, considered parsley stalks a mild aphrodisiac, but he finds that "you need a bushel to really get you cracking." Twice within a few days, he observed during the closing segment of the show: "There are two things a man can still do for a woman [pregnant pause]. The other one is to carve the roast on Sunday."

Those closers are the quintessential Kerr. The dish has been carried into a dining-room set that looks like something left over by Liberace. Candles are aglow. Violins are playing Chopin or The Man I Love. Kerr's lips tremble with rapture. He blows kisses to his own cuisine and launches into the most passionate eating scenes since Tom Jones. Occasionally he falls as flat as a novice's souffle. He once referred to the trimming of mushroom stems for a steak-kidney-mushroom-and-oyster pie as "a small circumcision." He crimped the edge of a piecrust with a gag-store pair of false teeth. His hyper-Briticisms tend to be overdone.

Kerr is entertaining, but his casual, anything-for-a-laugh approach can only confuse his less-experienced students. He never uses a measuring cup and knocks Fanny Farmer for her chemistry-class precision. But how are his viewers going to know that a Kerr "short slurp" equals one fluid ounce or that "one glug" means one and a half? Julia Child, appalled by his use of canned asparagus and packaged ham slices, writes his program off as "a desecration of fine cooking." He is producing "a personality show or a ladies' show," she says. "He's a tall, handsome, well-proportioned young man, and many women like to look at handsome men."

Kerr replies that his approach is "more practical than theoretical" and that his series is "up to date." Born in

London to hotelkeeping parents, Kerr (pronounced Care) was, as he says, "taken from the breast and put onto a bottle warmed by a French chef." By age 23 he was manager of the Royal Ascot Hotel, married to an actress, Treena Van Doorne, and already bored with the business. So he moved to New Zealand on the grounds that it was "great for family life, if not for anything else." The second live show ever carried on New Zealand television turned out to be an omelet-cooking demonstration by Flight Lieutenant Kerr. So enthusiastic was the response that he soon decided to resign from the air force. By 1961, he was the leading male TV personality in New Zealand. He then sold his show to Australia and merchandised three bestselling cookbooks. Through an arrangement with Fremantle International, a U.S. television-show producer and distributor, he soon spread to Singapore, Hong Kong and, inevitably, to the States. Last fall the Young & Rubicam advertising agency offered upwards of $4,000,000 for a Kerr package of shows through August 1971.

Kerr's wife now produces the series, which is taped in Ottawa. The other 13 staffers include a scullery maid for the dishes and a man who mops the misfires from the floor. The Kerrs' three children remain in suburban Sydney, where Graham has a harbor-front home with a swimming pool. When there, he wakes up at 6 a.m. every day for a dip. A former competitive fencer, rugby player and yachtsman, he manages to keep himself down to 186 Ibs. (he is 6 ft. 4 in. tall). Down Under, he receives what he considers proper deference. News of his show-biz success in the States is played on Page One in the newspapers, and no one knocks him for his merchandising talent. After all, observes Graham, even Escoffier, in his day, "was considered a shaman and an entrepreneur." Kerr may be both, but he certainly is no Escoffier.

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